Foot Locker’s National Cross Country Meet Took An Obscure, Gritty Sport And Made It Glamorous
By Marc Bloom for DyeStat
There’s something profoundly sad about the end of the Foot Locker High School Cross Country Championships after a run of 45 years.
I would guess that some who worked on the event had already begun imagining a big 50th celebration five years hence. It would have been cool to see an array of past winners like Sara Hall (now a top pro), Carrie Tollefson (now a top announcer) and Dathan Ritzenhein (a former top pro and now top coach) come to San Diego to represent the event’s glorious history, talk about old times (pun intended) and swap war stories.
For many a year, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Foot Locker, which began in 1979 as Kinney, was the biggest thing going. Every distance runner of note craved to “make Foot Locker” through one of its four regional qualifying events. In the Northeast at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, often in wintry conditions, qualifiers would be hustled into a makeshift tent near the finish to sign up for nationals and keep warm. For a corporate event, that process always struck me as very un-fancy, in a cross country kind of way.
In those primitive days before technology and the Internet — before websites took over, before there were national championships left and right in every season and invitational races every weekend, before that company in Oregon created its own competing event — Foot Locker pretty much had the landscape of the elite runner to itself.
Foot Locker handled that role well in knowing where its strengths and weaknesses lay. The team’s marketing folks knew how to handle the kids’ travel and hotel set-up and put together a dressed-up awards ceremony; and they scored major points by having all 64 participants (later, 80) call their local media once back at the hotel after the race so the reporter from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune or Houston Chronicle could get the story. It was quite a system, as I observed it for hours in a conference room while pecking out my own New York Times account.
Talk about primitive. Then, the athletes used landline phones, and the reporters back home, like me, knocked out their stories, for the most part, on typewriters. With the benefit of a shower and some time to think, these running teens were not only articulate but could parse the nuances of the race with a coach’s maturity.
The Foot Locker media crew never missed a beat…
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